Voice Staff
On Saturday, Feb. 7 at 11 a.m., the Voice met with President Anne McCall to conduct an interview regarding the staff layoffs on Feb. 5. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: When was it clear that staff were going to be cut? What were the other options? When was the decision made to cut staff?
Okay. So, I don’t have specific dates for you here, right now, but I can tell you that we started knowing that something was … that we were reaching a moment where there weren’t going to be a lot of other options in mid to late fall, which is why I brought it up at a couple of meetings, so that there would be –– it would be out there, that we had reached that point of thinking about things. I also explained the methodology that we would be using at the staff meeting after Thanksgiving to look at positions …
So we went through a multi-phase process. You start with the fact that we gained dramatic, new, and much deeper, much sharper business acumen when we hired the Vice President for Finance and Business who’s in place right now [David Jones]. I highly recommend that on another occasion you all interview him. He’s an alum, he’s the father of an alum. He completely shares our values. He’s lived our values. He’s had his son benefit from our values. I think unlike any other CFO I might have hired, I didn’t have to have multiple conversations with him about how we have to protect I.S., even though I.S. uses an immense amount of faculty time and therefore money, FTEs [Full-time equivalents].
Since he came into place, he reviewed everything. He hired new leaders on his team. He gave long term planning expertise. We have reviewed everything you could possibly imagine, at least for me, and more. … We look at the use of all kinds of things.
So for example, what’s normal in colleges to do? So for instance, before we made any changes into the health center, we looked both at ‘what do all of our peers do,’ and also ‘when are people actually using our health center?’ Because we have data that shows that. And so you’re trying to make decisions that will be financially strong and helpful to the College while impacting as few possible if you’re reducing services. And sometimes, you’re not reducing services, you’re simply doing business better. So it depends on the case.
Anyway, [David Jones] is continuing to do that. That’s his thing, day in and day out, but we had gotten to a point where we knew that marginally, incrementally, we weren’t going to get a lot more lift out of that process. Another part of that process has been also learning as a College to use our endowment funds more efficiently and effectively. We’ve always used our endowment funds properly. We haven’t ever misused them. But we haven’t always used them, or used them properly. And so we were able — during this period of the past year and a half, two years — to buy time, to find solutions to the problems, by putting into play endowment funds that had been made available to the College but that we actually hadn’t spent. And so, you know, during this process, using that money rather than making cuts preemptively.
Then we moved into a process where it became not just challenging, but extremely challenging to replace people who leave, right? So some of you may have noticed … that there are positions that may have existed at the College before, that just don’t exist anymore. That’s not by chance. That was part of our trying to ramp down our staffing structure and our staffing expenses in line with our revenue and student body size. And we did a lot of that. But there’s a moment where that too, there’s a limit to what you might get that way. In the meeting, I had mentioned the national quit rate, and probably because people are upset, they may have misunderstood what I was trying to say. I never look for people to leave the College — it’s not my purpose, but we know that in regular people’s lives, there’s a national rate at which people change their jobs, and we too, like any institution, right? We’ve got over 400-something people who work here, people leave every year, and there’s a percentage rate of people who leave, that you can also use to think about, ‘will we be able to reduce our deficit just by depending on the normal changes in jobs that people make, and then not replacing more people?’ It turns out that this year, the national rate has plummeted, and ours along with it. So by very late fall, we had come to the conclusion that this wasn’t going to work for us as a strategy, and we had probably gone as far as we could without taking other actions …
Over these two year periods, David has reported to the entire faculty and staff on, I want to say three occasions — I might be wrong, but I think it’s three occasions on our budget — where we are as a college, what are we doing, what are we trying to do? To increase awareness and a sense of shared purpose behind some of the changes that we were making that were less popular than other things. But anyway, we get to this point where it starts not looking as though we can really start to bridge that gap without taking other actions. And then you just start looking at what it is that we can do.
But there is also the dialogue ongoing with the board of trustees. We know we can’t fully bridge that gap. So in order to bridge that gap fully, we’re going to need board of trustee support, right? So what kind of step do we need to take to become a financially healthy institution, staffed at the size of the student body we have and that we’re likely to have for several more years … I say that because even with the changes that we’ve made, this is going to be a multi-year process. During this process, we’re going to be taking, we will depend in part on additional influxes of funding from our endowment. So our plan already requires special funding from our endowment, right?
For the board, I’m speaking now on behalf of people who aren’t here to speak for themselves. But our normal … draw rate is 5%. That’s a pretty standard drawing rate across the country … and normally, why do you have that rate? It’s because it allows the endowment to build so that its relative value remains the same in spite of inflation over time, right? So that 100 years from now, that endowment hasn’t disappeared because we ate it all in 2024, 2026. So you always want some of that money when you’re investing the College’s money, some flows out to be spent, some goes back in to hedge against inflation, okay?
So if you’re asking for additional funding, it is a very serious kind of request, that’s not a willy-nilly kind of request that you can make … So for us to be in a position where we can ask the board to do that, and for our major donors to invest in us, we have to show that we are taking all the steps that we can take to be financially responsible, right?
So then you look at the picture and you say, ‘okay, we used to have 2,200 students, right?’ We started this year — there are always fewer students in the spring than in the fall, but we started the fall with 1,700 students. And we’re at, for the spring, you know, under 1,500. That’s 700 fewer students, that’s a third less, practically, than five years ago. So it also, intuitively or logically would make sense, that you should need fewer people if you’re serving fewer students, right?
None of this means that we can’t be a great college the way we are now. Our college used to be this size. There are great colleges in America that are this size, so you can’t equate size with greatness, right? … What they have in common, if they’re in healthy shape, is that they shape their expenses to match their revenue and to match the size of the student body. And so that’s the work that we’re engaged in right now. It’s really serious, important work for our future, so that we don’t end up in the position of the colleges that are failing, right? We could spend $10 million a year out of our endowment for the next five years. We’d have $50 million less, and 5% of that less for our yearly basis going forward. That doesn’t strengthen our institution if we haven’t changed the model. We haven’t changed the model, we’ll continue to be in the hole after that. So there’s a moment where you just have to take stock and start thinking about what it is you should do.
Q: There have been discussions of staff that have been working here for many years who are seen by students as mission-critical, as legacy, and other mission-critical staff. Can you speak to what factors were in that decision-making process?
Sure. So, we are a small, tight-knit community, so every single person contributes to the mission of the College. Every single person … So, it’s not that anybody at this college could have been let go without it being a loss … Everybody contributes to who we are at the College, okay? But how do you get down to — if you have to make reductions, some people are going to need to go. That’s how it works.
So we did an analysis in, really four different ways, and it ends up with a qualitative analysis. So don’t worry, it’s not just about the numbers. But, you know, we started by looking at, for all the different areas, what percentage of our budget do they take up? … Let me start by saying, we decided purposefully that we weren’t gonna do an across-the-board cut. If you cut everybody by the same percentage, you cut areas that, if there’s an area that’s running on a shoestring, you make that shoestring even worse, and an area that might be doing better, they don’t suffer as much and it actually exacerbates inequities across the campus …
So to begin with, we didn’t do straight-up amounts, but we said, ‘okay, if we need to reduce by 10%, 12%, 15%, what percentage does that — of our expenses — did that particular area already have and should they have a percentage that reflects that, right? … How much money would we need to look for in that area to fulfill that?’ Then we looked at it in terms of fixed and variable costs. By the way, that’s called, in case you have like this HR kind of speak, that’s called “linear scalable.” You know, I’m [a French Literature professor], I learned that expression this year. Then we looked at fixed and variable. So there’s some positions at the College, it doesn’t matter if there are 100 students or 10,000 students, you’re going to have to have those positions at the College. They’re not- it’s easy to end up being soft on yourself and calling everybody a fixed one. That’s what happens when you start going through it. ‘We can’t have this without this, we can’t have a this without a that.’ But eventually, when you’re a little bit stricter with yourself, you say, ‘oh, okay…’
… Then we looked at it in a functional analysis. So we –– and in all of this, we used benchmarking with other colleges and universities as well, to the best of our capacity to do so. For functional, we looked at roles that have overlap with other areas. Things that can be, perhaps, done by people in different places, et cetera. And there are areas that pop up on that. And then at the end, you look at those three areas and you say, ‘What drops out?’ or, ‘what gets reinforced with the three different types of analysis, right?’
And then last but not least, on the contrary, we look at our mission. What are we supposed to be doing as a college? At the end of the day, if we need to find a certain amount of money, what are we seeking to impact less rather than more? So one could think that, in an exercise that really is partly caused by and relates to a drop in student enrollment, that most of the positions that would be lost would be on the student-facing side. In fact, the majority is on the non-student facing side … So that’s the overall approach that we looked at.
And you’ll notice we didn’t just reduce personnel. We’re also kind of reshaping where some people report. And the goal in that was to do everything that we could to mitigate the harm by creating at least some areas where you could have cross-trading and backup …
Q: We received a tip that you met with Senators Jon Husted and Bernie Moreno. First, is that true? Second, can you disclose to any degree what you talked about or what the nature of the meeting was, particularly as it relates to the College?
Certainly. So I did not meet with Senators Husted and Moreno, but I did meet with their staffers last week, as well as with Representative Max Miller, who’s the representative for our area.
I met with them in the context of the national meeting of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. It’s an advocacy group for higher education in the private sphere in our country. And every year, there is a meeting in Washington. We have two statewide meetings in the fall and in the spring, but we have an annual meeting the last weekend in January, the first week in February … People who work in law firms and higher ed, etc.: all for us to know more about the public policy affecting higher education, and for us to ask questions of our elected and appointed officials.
In the context of that meeting … we go as a delegation to visit our elected officials. So anybody who’s from a private college or university in the state of Ohio, we went together to meetings with those representatives, as well as with the senators who were available to us. Now, the partial government shutdown affected all of our visits, as well as the people who came and talked or when they came and talked, right? So the only elected official I met with was our representative.
What do we talk about? We talk about things that affect private education in the state, and we make pitches for what we all agree on in our delegation when we go as a group, our biggest issues. So we always thank them for their support of Pell Grant and ask for more support of Pell Grant. That’s a standard, I haven’t ever seen that out of the lineup. Depending on the year, we will bring up other issues and talk about them …
… I can tell you, I brought up in one of the meetings, I can’t remember which one, the H-1B visa issue. The hardship that that’s created for our institution, in terms of being able to attract and retain great international talent, and the fear on our campus through that, and to ask for support … That’s what we talked about.
Q: What can we expect going forward?
As I said in the meeting on Thursday, we have achieved the vast majority of the salary savings that we were seeking to make by doing this action. Specifically, approximately 80%. At this point, I can neither promise nor deny that there may be future action; a lot depends on our success in other changes that are going on simultaneously during this period. So we may need to do virtually nothing else, and we may need to do more. But what I know is the vast majority has already occurred.
When I was speaking the other day, I can’t remember how the question was asked, but the question was, ‘what were … the three things that to me were central to what we needed to invest in for the future, right?’ And I can understand that any particular position that was cut could be imagined as, perhaps should have been belonging to this, but the first one was I.S. and the academic programs that lead up to it. To start with, we’re a higher education institution. We provide education that leads to degrees. So our academic mission is at the absolute core of what we do, right? And so I am eager for us to work as a College, ever more effectively in highlighting through the shape of our curriculum, emerging fields of knowledge and responding to student interests that way … But I am not interested in doing that by cutting us off at the base. We do have contract employees on our campus, people who are visiting faculty. Depending on the size of our student body, they may or may not receive new contracts, but we’re not breaking any contracts with anybody …
Okay, so, one of the main goals of the board of trustees is that we invest in our future, to the extent of our means, but that we invest in our future. Our tenure track faculty today on our campus are our future, along with our future students, right? … And I have no desire to deprive students today or tomorrow of that growing- the growing areas of expertise and the rising experts in the field that our junior faculty represent …
Q: How did the board of trustees take a role in the cuts that were made, and what does that look like from an administrative standpoint?
I am responsible for where the cuts happened and how they happened, because that’s the management side of the house. I worked closely with cabinet members in terms of talking about which areas and which functions, because I don’t have enough area expertise to be able to do that by myself, but I am the responsible party for the final decisions that were made.
In all of this process, though, I stayed in close contact with the chair of the board, and with the executive committee of the board so that we were on the same page, because it does implicate the values of the College. It does implicate the very mission of the College and the board of trustees has that fiduciary responsibility at its core. The board of trustees is responsible for keeping our institution alive, healthy, thriving, 100 years from now, not just today, right? But it’s inappropriate for a board of trustees to say, ‘cut this person, not that person, cut more in this area, cut more in that area.’ And so it’s in dialogue with the board of trustee leadership that we’ve moved in this direction …
Q: Why did you not take a paycut?
So my compensation package is private, just as everybody else’s is on campus. It’s absolutely correct that I’m on the 990 [form]. There are parts of my pay, my compensation package, that I have actually never claimed because the College is in difficulty. And I knew that it had some troubles from the very beginning, although I didn’t know the extent of the amount of work ahead of us. And I have also made adjustments since then, but because I consider them private, I’m not going to be talking about them …
